One of many issues facing women in STEM is dual-career challenges. Finding two STEM jobs at once in the same area can be very difficult. Often couples rely on institutions to provide jobs for them both if one gets hired. Statistically, women are more likely than men to give up on their careers or change career trajectories for the sake of their spouse. That is what makes this such an important issue relating to gender equity. 

One article about this was published in the Journal of Higher Education in 2000, titled Dual-Career Couples: Keeping Them Together. It stresses the importance and challenge of offering viable jobs for couples who are both in academic fields. It discusses a survey of chief academic officers at various institutions. The survey asks questions about institutional dual-career assistance policies. Of the 360 responses they received, 24% of respondents reported having dual-career assistance policies at their institution. Most of the institutions reported that they would give faculty accommodations of this type, but mostly on an ad hoc basis. Also, universities which attempted to assist spouses in finding jobs were successful less than half the time. 

The study showed that dual-career assistance was often overlooked in 2000. Today, most universities in the United States have some form of dual-career policy. These help faculty find placement for themselves and their spouses. The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC), a group that helps people find jobs in academia, has many resources for dual-career placement. These resources are much easier to find than they were in the past. What’s more, dual-career couples themselves are more abundant than they were in 2000. According to a 2019 McKinsey article, Making It Work: How Dual-Career Couples Find Fulfillment at Work, their survey of over 35,000 workers found that 89% of women and 70% of men were part of a dual-career couple. Issues remain for dual-career couples, but research seems to show that they have more options than they once did. Still, this remains an issue that must be addressed if we wish to advance women in STEM.

Read “Dual-Career Couples: Keeping them Together” 

Read “Making it Work”

Dr. Leslie Echols is this week’s featured woman in STEM. Dr. Echols is an assistant professor of Psychology, and she works with children to improve coping techniques for dealing with bullying, and help them build stronger friendships.

“Victims who end up on the worst trajectory are the ones who think, ‘It was my fault. It’s nothing I can change,’” Echols said. So part of the program will be retraining victims to attribute the bullying more appropriately, which is Graham’s specialty. “It’s reframing our thinking. What are other possible reasons this could have happened?”

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An interesting article was published in 2020, titled Overlapping Stigmas of Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Weight: Policy Implications for Employment and Higher Education. The article was written by Jeanine M. Skorinko, Angela C. Incollingo Rodriguez, and James K. Doyle from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This article sheds light on the stigmas faced by pregnant women and mothers in higher education and the workplace.  

Stigmas of Pregnancy outlines existing policies and accommodations for these women, as well as highlighting the lack of policies in certain places. It provides a valuable look at how certain institutions try to mitigate this stigma. Missouri State has its own policies to help women to advance in their careers. MSU’s policy library can be found here.   

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This week, our featured woman in STEM is Dr. Ann D. Rost. Dr. Rost is an associate professor of psychology who works with cancer patients, helping them cope with their health conditions and improve their quality of life.

Rost became interested in ACT her last year in graduate school at the University of Kansas, when she was working with patients with cancer and chronic pain conditions. The traditional therapy at the time focused on patient behavior and changing the content of thoughts.

“There was nothing to change about their thoughts, as they were being realistic in their fears and concerns about their health conditions,” she noted. “Telling them to think differently about their situation felt like it invalidated their whole experience.”

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